Monday, November 24, 2014

Sometimes she says, that’s good as if not getting it is
what she’s after but today she says, how can you not get it? You’re being
too rational.

Yes, I admit it. My mind is looking for threads, connective
tissue.

But, getting it, isn’t logical, says she. Let it just wash
over you.

I’m soaked and still trying to enter her realmeven if my gain is ill-gotten. Aha, here it is,

an aperture where I can crawl in and be there inside her
poem

with the grand piano, love seat and the woman

with the open button on her blouse, clues she has dropped

which add up to, I know not what.

I got it. I got it. I don't got it as in the Mel Brooks movie.

Now I've got it. by George I've got it.

Her poem is about not knowing what it’s all about,

not unlike this moment when my mind is frazzled worrying

about my daughter even while she is worrying about her cat

but the unworried cat gets it
because worry is part of not getting it,

IT being the collage in our heads, the vacancies and scraps,

as if Sherlock's breadcrumbs lead nowhere; elementary my dear

whats-his-name with his deductions that never entered a poem

or could find its way out of life’s maze even if the
4:57 out of

Hammersmith was delayed because of roadwork and the tobacco
stains on his left hand are clearly of a Turkish blend indicating
that the killer

must have been right-handed since his wrist was bandaged using a knot employed only in Anatolia and now if you think you’ve got it you really don’t since life doesn’t rhyme nor is it a straight ahead train

of thought which stops at Hammersmith station but instead goes to Heisenberg's Uncertainty just like the shadows on the rug

in Peggy's poem and the blue air curling.______________________________Here's is Peggy's Poem

INDOORS

Clues leave vacancies to give the mind
a chance to wander. A baby grand,

a love seat, the curtains lifting in and out.

The man, perhaps a philosopher, has entered.
Wings beat as the sound of music drowns
the words forming on his lips. Another first

has fallen. Her blouse unbuttoned.
He longs to hear the song she is singing,
but his hand reaches to catch the wind.

She watches the dove, inconsistent as
the curling blue air. There is a beginning with
thought giving way to the shadows on the rug.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

A montage of Thanksgiving memories from early school
days…….orange construction paper with drawings of turkeys gobbling or on
the table, Pilgrims on Plymouth rock. My turkeys looked more like Pilgrims and my Pilgrims could have been mistaken for Plymouth Rock. Then there were happy Indians and a hymn hummed…….

We gather together
…..Nothing wrong with that.

To ask the Lord’s
blessing ………this is suspect, maybe we don’t deserve it.

He hastens and
chastens ……nice rhyme and catchy tune but what’s with the rush? And
who is he scolding with his chastens?

His will to make known
…………OK, get on with it.

The wicked oppressing
now cease from distressing ….more rhymes but what are we singing about? Who’s
doing the oppressing and who is being distressed?

Sing praises to his
name ……………It can’t hurt. If we said thanks
loads, Lord, for the good life,she would reply, You Betcha, No Problem.

He forgets not his own.
…..Is it only his own he remembers? This sets up the all too familiar Us and
Them.

So we have the Native American hosts and first European
settlers, those uninvited guests who stole their land and never left. Something
went wrong with this arrangement from the Indian point of view.... to say nothing of the turkey's.

From out of our rapacity and manifestly ungodly destiny it
has evolved that we sit down for a sumptuous feast, by the accident of
geography, unless we happened to be indigenous people or needy people or those
living in the rubble of bombed or bulldozed homes.

It turns out this hymn was written during the Eighty Years
War between Holland and Spain in the 16th and early 17th
century. The Dutch were Protestants looking to break away from Catholic Spain.
So gathering together was itself a
subversive act. The oppression was from the Papacy who saw their grip on Europe
unraveling. We revived it in the twentieth century beseeching God to lift the
distress caused by the Axis powers’ oppression. …and he’d better hasten and
chasten.

In its travels the hymn has gone from the front lines of
war, where it is always a good idea to have God on your side, to the dining
room table where, in his name we hasten without chastening the chardonnay and
stuff ourselves with stuffing just short of exploding. No hint of distressing from oppressing
unless you count some insufferable neighbor who wrangled an invitation and
arrived an hour late causing everyone to fill up on nibbles. But it is the
season to forgive such transgressions even as our gluttony is followed by sloth. God pardons such sins once a year on Thanksgiving. Aren’t
we all pilgrims stumbling and bumbling our way trying to make sense of our brief allotment of time?

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Beware of being thanked
for calling. Can you Imagine how much more grateful they’d have been if you
hadn’t called?

Listen carefully. Our menu options have recently changed.

Their menu options change more often than Izzy’s Deli. Do they get some pleasure from doing this? Pity the
poor guy who has just hit “3” and got disconnected because he didn’t listen
carefully even though that worked yesterday.

If you are a Civil War veteran, press one.

If you're a terrorist and wish to turn yourself in for
enhanced interrogation, press two.

If you are a visitor from another planet, press three.

If you just went out the wrong exit in a parking lot and
experienced severe tire damage, press four.

All other calls remain on the line.

What if I am all four
of the above?

Your call is very important to us and will be answered in
the order received.

If it’s so important why
are you putting me through all this? Must I continue listening to Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons? I feel as if I’m in the fifth season. I’ve read the entire newspaper
including the temperature in Tegucigalpa. I’ve looked at the obits and I think
I spotted myself.

We are experiencing an unusually high call volume.

What if I called back
between midnight and three? Have you ever not experienced a high call volume?If you had more than one operator this occurrence
would be less usual.

Your expected wait time is one hour and forty minutes.

Translation: Only a
loser would continue to hold….shut-ins or people who are wasting their lives
anyway or lonely folks eager to have someone to talk to since they have no
friends or just returned from their dentist who wouldn’t let them get a word in
except for a grunt and occasional spit.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

There is a certain elegance about numbers; the way proofs
clinch the correct answer and how twelve always follows eleven. A foot can be
counted on for its twelve inches and a half day contains no more than twelve
hours. And then there is mid-night.

However a Baker’s dozen is thirteen and the twelfth month of
year is named after the number ten (Decem). Twelve is the last year before teenage-hood
but some stay there forever. In soccer and football the twelfth man refers to the 50,000 to 90,000 spectators cheering or
jeering at the right time to give an advantage to the home team.

There is also the story of twelve in my life. How I was minus
twelve when Peggy was born and she came to Los Angeles to feel the earth quake
my barging in on the world in 1933 ... then returned to New York... not to meet me
until I was twice twelve in 1957, back in L.A. She doesn’t remember that
occasion but 24 years later we met for good. A match when I was five and she seventeen would have been highly unsuitable but at age fifty & sixty-two almost unremarked upon. And now, somehow in defiance of
the calendar, we are the same age.

On Tuesday Republicans swept the country…….or did they? The
bottom twelve Red states combined (19 million) have half the
population of California (38 million). Even with the addition of the next ten
they comprised less than the number California residents. Yet these 22 Red states will send 44 senators to Washington while we send two. In other words the great
majority of Americans live in urban settings and are solidly Democratic. The
Republican vote represents ranches, golf courses, equestrian trails and mega-farms
owned by the 1% and where few people live.

In the twelfth century things didn’t look so good either. The
Hanks and Dicks were exchanging thrones in England bathing the countryside
in regal blood. There were twelve knights at Arthur’s Round Table itching to joust and with a nose for trouble though a can opener might be needed to reach their nostrils.
The Church still held a choke hold on the lives of the flock. Yet the stage was
being set for the burst of a Renaissance to follow. A millennium later, out of today’s
dark period, embers may yet light up the centuries to come.

Twelve has shown itself to be a portentous number. The last
time I bought a dozen bagels the woman gave me the senior discount by adding an
extra one. Jesus thought he had twelve apostles but we have to subtract Judas
making it eleven. Christianity flourished nevertheless.

Perhaps in two years the no-shows will show up on Election
Day and vote to throw the rascals out. Twelve is bursting with the seeds of
(can I say this word?) revolution. For Republicans who think they have a mandate,
think again. The President got a mandate two years ago when the whole nation
voted. Think, Twelve Angry Men and remember,
Twelve Years a Slave won the Oscar
last year. The twelfth day of Christmas (January 6th) is Epiphany Day. I never met one I didn't love.

I led her to the breaking news on the radioShe showed me a portal to the realm of nocturnes.We traveled to Ketchikan with its totems and raven rattles,then found our own creation mythin how we were born together.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Peggy must be getting better. Her appetite has returned. I
know this because she eats my cooking which only a desperately hungry person
would do. I have mastered her eggs at 4.5 minutes. A croissant nukes exactly 29 seconds in the microwave straight from the freezer. An then there was the chicken marsala...

Don’t expect an invitation for dinner. I’m not ready for prime time.
Besides, we don’t carry a renter’s policy against gastro-intestinal reflux
disease. There’s already too much illness out there. Imagine the days when
measles, mumps and whooping cough were the scourge. Now we have new imported
worries and gazillions of bucks spent on maladies unimagined a generation ago.

Every sporting event is interrupted by Viagra and Cialis
commercials as if impotence had reached epidemic proportions. I contend that our
true national health issue is Electile Dysfunction.

Each off-year November, Liberals go limp while Conservative
get aroused at the poles…I mean polls. Is there something about meanness and
mendacity that transmutes to eroticism? I can’t imagine Mitch McConnell as an
object of desire. If there is anything sexy about Karl Rove it eludes me.
Yet enlightened folks, by the millions, will stay home, semi-comatose, while
the far-right will stiffen themselves and ejaculate at the voting booth.

It would seem to me that the party who authors legislation
to suppress voting rights would be enough to excite you students to get it up
and cast your lot at least for a one-night stand. Think of it as recreational sex
if you must. Vote for your manhood. For your student-loan. Go get your identification card. Take a friend to the polling place. Have
yourself an orgy. For virgin voters come and feel the earth move a fraction of an inch.

The newspapers say that Hispanics will be sitting this one
out because they’re upset with Obama. Six years in office and he’s lost his sex
appeal? The Dream Act is still hot. Know who your friend is. Think Sonia
Sotomayor. Think which party begs for immigration reform. Think minimum wage.

Who are these people who do vote? Have they gone to bed with
the Koch Bros.? Has the message reached their glands and stopped before it got
to their brains? I suppose vague discontent answers to simplistic slogans. God is not on the ballot. If this country ignores science, goes further into war and
tramples on its own work force with stagnant wages it will be because
Republicans found the way to eroticize their message of fear and loathing.

Maybe a telethon is called for to end Electile Dysfunction.
Must Democrats run Gwyneth and George or Angeline and Brad for the voters to get
Viagrified and show up on Tuesday?